Transcript
P. Light: I'm Paul Light. I'm the director of governmental studies here at Brookings. And I was the person at the Pew Charitable Trusts to whom this original proposal for a little book on campaign etiquette arrived, and I think I had the good sense to recommend it to the Pew board for funding.
Three or four years ago, it seems like just a moment ago, but it was about three-and-a-half, four years ago. Now I am at Brookings as director of governmental studies, where I have the honor of supporting Steve in his work, and seeking funding for the second edition of this wonderful book, which also came from Pew, and I'm sure Pew is proud of the result.
I've had a relationship with Steve Hess now for, I don't know, 18 years almost, having come here as a guest scholar in 1983. He had already been here forever it seemed. He has been at the Brookings Institution for 27 years, 29 years is it, unbelievable, and has produced an extraordinary body of work that really does stand as a body of work on the role of journalism and public life. His books on the Washington reporters, International reporters, reporters of all kinds are wonderful, chronicle and constitute a body of work that continues to be drawn upon. And he's now obviously, and long been a commentator on the way politics is conducted in this country, but he's becoming, at this point in his career, a voice for not niceness, per se, but a form of discourse that I think improves and strengthens the performance of democratic process in this country. Not as a naysayer or a shamer, but as a person who points the way towards better discourse through example and through his writing.
I'm just delighted to be in a position of introducing Stephen Hess, and be in a position in my own career where I could get the opportunity to introduce Steve to talk about the second edition of this wonderful book.
Steve.
[Applause]
S. Hess:: You should only applaud after the person has spoken, I think. I'm not going to really speak about the book. It is, indeed, a little book. It consists of 41 essays arranged alphabetically from A is for Advertising, and B is for Bias, each one attempts to tell something about what the situation is in the United States in terms of niceness, if you will. And then proposes something in the nature of a rule of etiquette. I thoroughly enjoyed writing it. It is a very understand-Brookingsish book, there are no footnotes and other things, although there are some references in the back if you'd care to learn more about etiquette after you finish this.
Paul left out one really truly important thing in talking about this book. And that is, it was his idea. And it was called, as you would expect, because he was a director at Pew, the Manual of Campaign Discourse at the time, but we changed it to The Little Book of Campaign Etiquette. It's been somewhat star-crossed in terms of the fact that when it was launched in 1998, it was on the 8th of September, and that happened to be the day that Ken Starr delivered his report on the president's etiquette to the United States Congress. Today, we launch a second edition, and I wish I had a special chapter on the etiquette for protesters who somehow don't like the World Bank. We could do perhaps a little better in that regard.
What we have done, though, is put together a little five minute home movie. You will see this takes us somewhat through Iowa, into Super Tuesday, at record speed. I want to thank Liz Molesky [sp] who found the tapes for us, and to Marguerite Iyan [sp] who was the producer of this little film. So, we're going to see the little film, and then I will introduce you to our panel.
[Video shown]
S. Hess: That's our home movie.
Now, let me say that I got to this town to work for Dwight Eisenhower. He had a favorite cartoon from the old Saturday Evening Post. It had a man at a lectern like this saying: Our next speaker needs all the introduction he can get. After 40 odd years, I am finally on a panel where I can really say, we have a panel that needs no introduction, and I'm only going to introduce them because I want to.
Al Hunt over there in the first chair ran by my house this morning at 7 o'clock, wearing I guess it was a Wakeforest sweatshirt, I didn't notice, with this running mate Kate Lehrer [sp] with him, and he waved and said, I've been up all night preparing for this. Al Hunt, as you all know, and million readers of the Wall Street Journal, is the breath of moderation that we read every Thursday on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. His column is somewhat in counterpoint to the page across the way. Before that, he was very distinguished bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal in Washington, particularly appreciated for his efforts to create diversity in his bureau, and we go back as friends a very long way. He's a special, special person.
Judith Martin is Miss Manners. Miss Manners is Judith Martin. To her millions of readers and fans of both her column and her books, she does something really quite special, and she does it with elegant writing and wicked, wicked humor. She tells us things that we need to know, but never lectures at us.
E.J. Dionne is my cherished colleague here at Brookings, a senior fellow in governmental studies. The columnist for the Washington Post and syndicated as well, and also has a column on language in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine. He's the author of such books as Why Americans Hate Politics. But I met him first when he was a bureau chief in Rome. He's the only one on the panel, I think, who could probably tell us about the etiquette of electing a pope.
Eventually, we're going to hear from Chris Matthews. Chris, as you know, is the host of the MSNBC Hardball with Chris Matthews. He is also the bureau chief for the San Francisco Examiner. And the two of us have a special connection. We are both members of the most exclusive club in Washington. You may think that it's a the Senate, as Richard Nixon said, you would be wrong. You may think it's the Gridiron of which Al Hunt is the only member on this panel, but, no, it's the Judsen-Welliver [sp] Society, which is a club of former presidential speech writers who get together every other year to give speeches to each other.
And so, I'm going to have us free associate for a bit based on that film. We're going to then have our conversation, and then we'll open it to questions.
How many campaigns have you been through Al, and where does this one sort of fit into the etiquette scheme? Take out your slide rule and figure it out.
A. Hunt: I was going to say, I think it was the McKinley campaign that it began, that's what my wife says. That's not quite true, Steve.
I, as a kid reporter in Boston, I managed to sneak up to New Hampshire in 1968 to the consternation of my dear friend Allen Otten, who was then the Washington bureau chief, who didn't know what this kid reporter was doing up in New Hampshire, but I really started to cover politics in the early '70s, so I guess I haven't counted back, but I guess this is my seventh or eighth.
This is not the most edifying campaign that I ever covered. I thought with John McCain in it, it was one of the most interesting. I personally thought John McCain was one of the most interesting political figures we've seen in a long time. I thought he was--probably since Robert Kennedy, I thought he was one of the rare establishment figures who really threatened to shake up the establishment, and that was fascinating.
Going to your point, and the point of this really fascinating book, I think that there has been a great decline in political civility in campaigns, and there are a lot of reasons. You go through many of them in the book. But I keep coming back to some extent to Pat Moynihan's great observation about the reason that academic politics is so vicious is because so little is at stake. And to some extent I think we don't have the great issues that we had before. And I think those issues produced some very petty and some very nasty politics on occasion, but they also enabled people to rise to great heights. And I certainly haven't seen very much of that in this campaign.
S. Hess: Judith did something for which I am eternally grateful, as is Brookings. She wrote the introduction to The Little Book of Campaign Etiquette. And I suspect, as a journalist going back some time, that you were probably tougher on journalists than you were even on politicians. Is this something that you've noticed over these years in what's happening to the journalism profession that contributes to this etiquette gap?
J. Martin: Well, actually, I see a little progress on the part of the politicians this time, because they're vilifying one another not for being devils, but for being negative, which may have the same effect, but it recognizes that sensibility is required here.
I am a lifelong journalist, and I do not wish to attack my own profession, but I don't think the same progress has been made there, and the realization that you can have strong controversy without, and you can cover strong controversy without being rude. There is still this equation which politicians used rather successfully a few years ago where moral fervor is connected with rudeness, and politeness is connected with a kind of a moral wussiness. That if you really cared, you wouldn't behave civilly. I still don't see that, and I see a confusion all around in what the opposite of rudeness and incivility is. People think, politicians think, well, then they should love one another, and then they'd all be polite, which doesn't explain divorce court, does it.
And journalists have used the excuse of, well, but it's the public trust that enables you to behave rudely to get what you want, which I don't think is borne out by fact. I think when you are disruptive and when you are rude, people close down, and they react in ways that are not journalistically productive. We all know the scam of being sympathetic and how it brings out what people might not otherwise say.
S. Hess: E.J., I was reminded as Judith was talking that I quote you in this book, and you say, "I'm willing to trade a little authenticity for a little courtesy." Do you still stand by that?
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: I think you misquoted me, and you certainly took me out of context. I guess, yes, is the answer. I worry a lot about authenticity in campaigns because it's usually fake authenticity, that it's an attempt to look authentic, and that we often can buy into that. And in the McCain campaign, what struck me, and this is something I would put to Chris, there were enormous reasons for being interested in McCain. But, in fact, he also was singularly successful because he was the perfect candidate for a moment when so much political coverage focuses on personality, celebrity, and the like, and his personal story was so compelling, it's not his fault that his personal story was so compelling, that I think he actually got an advantage out of this. And I worry sometimes more about the authenticity and the courtesy part.
On the other hand, I was struck. There was a piece in the Washington Post a few weeks back by Dana Milbank, which I thought was very interesting to our conversation, where he said, maybe we should stop waging war on negative campaigning. And I think maybe the distinction that we need to talk about a little bit is between sort of negative and trivial. And that if a member of Congress has voted, you know, cast 980 out of God knows how many votes, and the ad comes up and says, he's missed 100 votes, even though his attendance record is 98 percent, it's a kind of trivializing attack. Whereas, if people really disagree on things, and really go after each other's positions, that's not so bad. And, again, to use the McCain example, his decision to pull all negative campaigning off the air in South Carolina ended up diminishing his ability to challenge Bush on issues where they really did have differences, notably taxes.
Last point, one of my favorite rules in here is Steve saying that journalists should understand that metaphors have consequences. And he cites one o